Unschooled: Editorial on condition of primary and upper primary schools in West Bengal

To repopulate the schools, local bodies must persuade students to return, with efforts to help them in lessons which they have forgotten in the interim

TT Editorial Board   |    17.03.23  : Ensuring that all children go to school has still not been possible in India. The National Education Mission, following the principles of the National Education Policy 2020, aims to optimise resources, which is no bad thing. The only problem is that school education in a country so vast and various cannot be best understood in terms of quantity. Under instructions from the NEM, West Bengal published a list of 8,206 primary and upper primary schools that have less than 30 students. This is the first step in a tentative plan to close down the schools, although that decision has not been taken. According to the Centre’s education policy, dispersed schools in rural areas are economically unviable and administratively problematic, apart from having low teacher recruitment or without separate classes for each grade. So the children would be sent to other schools close by and the teachers to institutions that need them. Yet the Right to Education Act stipulated that primary schools should not be farther than one kilometre, and upper primary three. This took into account India’s distances and topographical difficulties while trying to make education accessible to all.